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Everyone understands about mirrors, even when they don't realize it. Haven't you ever looked inside and noticed the reflection of a corner of the room where the mirror simply could not have seen? You look down and see the reflection of your shoes but your shoes are well below the mirror. See? You understand, too.
Physicists have an opinion about this, and that opinion is made of math. Calculate the vector of this light beam (and ask a physicist what light really is, go ahead) striking the silvered backing and reflecting into your eyes, which see everything upside-down. Physics is just magic with numbers on.
The mirror world looks like our world, at least in the bits that are visible in any given mirror. This is important. Otherwise, we'd catch on to what it really is.
The mirror world is the backstage to the theater of our world. The scenery-shifting, the gods descending and devils rising on pulleys, the tug of sun and moon on ropes across the sky, all of that is handled back there. It's very complicated to get into order. Eclipses play hob with the whole system but they get the best feedback from the audience. The night of the New Moon is the simplest, giving everyone a break. (Pity about the time the stagehands left the Moon sitting in the barn when it wasn't in use. But they dusted it off after, and the milk from the cows after that gave off a pleasant glow.) Once the physicists catch on to how this works, they're going to have to come up with significantly more math to sort it all out.
The biologists will need to have a lie down.
Everyone knows about music, too. It's amazing how a tune will get into your head and still be humming there a decade later. A favorite song gets under your skin the way only the best poems will.
In the mirror world, the cats compose the music of the stars and the skies and the grass growing, and all the other songs for our world. They deliver them inside dreams, playing concerts at night from the other side.
Picture an enormous feline orchestra: cellos, flutes, timpani and bass, corexi and triangles. (Humans haven't sorted out how to replicate the music in their dreams made by an expert corexi player. We don't have the retractable claws or the tail to play one properly.) Cats of every shape and size and color, longhaired and short, yellow-eyed and green, move to the music inside of them as they play the sounds to fill human dreams in the real world.
Focus in on this little fellow: orange as a sunrise, his little paws still learning his craft. He was born a violinist like all the kittens in his litter, but you can't stop him fiddling. His sister the calico pulls out long, weepy notes from her own violin while her brother dances and skips beside her.
Fine, you say. Animals are alive. The known musical ability of the average feline has been observed to be low but that's no reason to believe there wouldn't be some exceptions. A cat playing a fiddle? Enough to make even a dog have a chuckle, if dogs could chuckle. (They do. Dogs may be the easy-going best friends on humans in our world, but in the mirror world, they are the most raucous of critics, ready to boo a bad sunset or appreciate a well-fiddled arpeggio.) But they're alive, and they can do things, and this makes sense.
But cutlery?
You're not alone in wondering about the inanimate objects. Tell someone that the movement of Sun and Moon across the sky are governed by a system of levers and pulleys, and they will have some questions but it makes a sort of sense just as telling them snowflakes are merely the tiny stars stapled to the sky falling down like leaves in winter to make space for the renewed stars growing in their place. The physicists will gaze at their calculators and supercomputers in irritated despair before letting out a very deep sigh, but otherwise, you can accept the sense in it. Space is very cold, after all. Stars must get cold when they fall through it to reach the ground.
It's harder to accept the dishes. Plates don't walk around. Spoons don't run. A dog might laugh, a cat might fiddle, and a cow might step over a discarded Moon. Dishware? Not so much.
Except of course, when it does. Inanimate objects are famous for becoming animate although it's less well known this is because they gain awareness. Socks are acknowledged as the worst but you would hurry away too if you woke up to discover someone putting their feet inside you. We all would. Pencils become aware of the words they've been used to write, and they jump off desks and out of bags to go through the mirror and write their own stories before all their wood and lead are gone. Screwdrivers make their way from toolboxes into tool enclaves on the other side of the mirror. Someone has to build all these sets.
Dishes don't come alive often. They're known for their sedentary lives, sleeping in stacks of their brethren, dreaming of pork chops. But sometimes, rarely, a single dish will taste a perfect Lad Na and come awake, wanting more. A spoon slumbering in the drawer is pulled out to ladle barbecue sauce over a simmering pan of chicken, and longs for another tangy taste. In the long nights of the kitchen, they'll murmur to one another, dish and spoon, telling each other sensuous tales of cumin and curry, guava and passionfruit, until the spoon trembles in the drawer and the dish rattles with need. Just one lick of cream, just one sprinkle of sugar, they tell each other until they're ready to burst.
There's always a mirror if you know where to look, high up in the powder room by the sink or even in the brightly-scrubbed surface of the glass oven door. Passing through to the other side is as easy as a dream of hot noodles. Socks vanish through all the time: how hard can it be?
The physicists have their opinions on this. One day soon, they'll have new theories to test.
Inside the mirror, the first thing new travelers see is the window back home, back to the tiny stage that believes itself the real world. The second thing they see are the clouds, puffs of steam pouring out day and night from huge kettles in the mirror kitchen, drifting into the sky.
This is the moment where so many go back. Better to be asleep with pleasant dreams of plums than go forward to learn the true nature of reality. Nothing is as terrifying as discovering everything you knew is wrong. But that's when the music starts, staid and ponderous while the fiddle dances above, and the Moon has been fished out of the cow byre again, rising on great strings to light the whole world in silver.
Side by side, together forever, the dish and the spoon go forth in search of raspberry cake.